Over the last few years mobile network operators have seen unprecedented growth in the amount of mobile data traffic in their networks. This data growth was primarily driven by the smartphone revolution that began with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, and it has fuelled increased user demand for bandwidth-hungry mobile data services. This resulted in a rapid growth of data volumes that has persisted, and continues to overwhelm many mobile network operators' networks, leading to high levels of network congestion, increased costs, and poor subscriber experience.
At the same time that the demand for mobile data traffic is increasing, mobile network operators are seeing falling revenues per gigabyte commensurate with the amount of data being consumed. This is caused by a variety of factors, including increased competition, “all you can eat” data plans, changing subscriber behaviors and expectations, and subscriber unwillingness to pay for increased data usage.
Mobile data traffic demands are predicted to continue growing rapidly, and if mobile network operators attempt to meet this demand with traditional base stations their radio access network equipment costs will increase significantly. With such growth in data traffic, even new cellular technologies, such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE Advanced, may not be able to keep pace with the demand.
Wi-Fi provides a low cost alternative to increasing network capacity when compared to traditional mobile phone network deployments because it combines both the benefits of smaller cell sizes and the use of unlicensed spectrum. As a result, mobile network operators are looking to Wi-Fi in an effort to alleviate network congestion and keep expenditures under control. Many mobile network operators have been deploying, and continue to deploy, large scale Wi-Fi networks.
Although mobile network operators have been aggressively deploying Wi-Fi networks, in most cases the Wi-Fi networks have very little integration with the mobile networks. This lack of integration may lead to a number of problems, such as an inability to adequately manage a subscriber's Wi-Fi offloading experience, and the loss of visibility of a subscriber's traffic, offloading behavior, and quality of experience. Further, the subscriber's experience of using operator-provided Wi-Fi is frequently very poor, due to poor quality of service, flaky coverage, and awkward and cumbersome login processes. Subscribers must often know that Wi-Fi provided by their mobile network operator is available in a particular location, and the Wi-Fi network must generally be selected manually. This results in a lot of missed offload opportunities and greatly reduces the utility of mobile network operators' Wi-Fi deployments. As such, improved systems and solutions that provide mobile network operators with the ability to better manage their subscribers' Wi-Fi offloading decisions will be beneficial to network operators and the consumers of their services.